


heaving through corrupted lungs

by plinys



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Road Trips, Self-Destruction, Suicidal Thoughts, Terminal Illnesses, wswinter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-15
Updated: 2015-01-15
Packaged: 2018-03-07 17:15:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3177547
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plinys/pseuds/plinys
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“You just got out of a war, Grant, you’re not about to drive some sick girl that you barely know across the country-“</p>
<p>“Why not?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	heaving through corrupted lungs

**Author's Note:**

> for wswinter week 3, and based on me listening to angsty indie music while trying to come up with an idea for a road trip au.
> 
> i wrote the last scene first, and its pretty hard to write a fic backwards so sorry for the messy bits here and there, also unbeta'd cause i'm trash and i don't have a beta for this ship oops.

There’s a support group that he’s meant to be attending, he can hear the voices carrying through the other side of the wall, people speaking up in support for each other, telling their stories as though talking about things could change everything.

It changes nothing.

Grant wonders how many of them actually realize it.

There’s a young man at a creaky little desk, a receptionist, that keeps looking between him and the door that he was meant to have entered.

“It’s alright if you can’t do it,” the man says, his voice quiet but steady, carrying just enough to be heard between the two of them, but not by the people in the other room, “many can’t – can’t sit in there- their first time.”

He takes that as his excuse to leave, but not before taking one look back at the room, just in time to catch a young woman standing up before the group - he leaves before any words are out of her mouth.

\---

His second attempt isn’t much better, but this time the receptionist – whose introduced himself as Fitz – sets a chair outside the door for him to sit on.

“It’s easier to - to listen to them sometimes,” Fitz tells him, “you don’t have to see their faces- makes it easier to pretend you don’t notice when somebody is not - is _missing_ next week.”

He probably thinks that he’s being supportive, that’s got to be something in the job description working at a place like this.  Grant can imagine the job interview now, some faceless figure asking ‘ _how comfortable are you talking to people that will be dead in a year_.’

He says, “thanks,” even though he hardly means it, and Fitz smiles back like it’s the greatest compliment he’s ever received.

Maybe it is.

How many dying people wasted their last breaths on a _thank you_.

\---

He shows up after the meetings have started, and leaves before they end each week.

It’s easier this way.

A month into this (out of the few he has left) and it’s been working, until he’s not the only person late.

Until there’s a woman, with this vague familiarity to her, though he doesn’t understand why until she speaks, her accent a sound he remembers from the past meetings.

She stops at the sight of him, eyes wide like a cartoon character, lips pursing into some troubling expression.

Before she settles down on the floor beside his chair.

“What are you doing?”

“This is where the people we came late wait,” she answers, voice familiar and light and so very certain, as though she dares for him to correct her.

He doesn’t know why he can’t manage those words, but he nods his head roughly and closes his eyes like he has every time before, trying not to listen to the shaky and unsteady breathing of the woman sitting beside him.

\---

She’s not late the next week.

He tries not to be disappointed by that, after all they had exchanged two sentences in total, but there had been something comforting about her presence.

When he asks, “who was she,” in a voice that barely carries across the waiting room, he’s not even slightly surprised that the other man knows exactly what she’s talking about.

“Jemma Simmons, she has about four months, radiation poisoning from her work led to lung problem, it’s not cancer but-“

“Got it,” Grant cuts him off not wanting to hear any more.

It’s all very clinical the way Fitz had said, and maybe it a place like this it has to be.

He wonders what it would be like to ask his own details to have somebody read off the verdict the same way they had overseas. He can still hear his commanding officer’s voice, the French in the background spoken by some pretty nurse that he had been flirting with for extra jello moments before, or when his question of how much longer it would be till he was back fighting the good fight, was answered with a frown.

_“Well, you’ll be fighting something,”_ John had said, with a tone that was meant to make light of the situation.

Had their situations been reversed Grant would have found some other way to break the news, but then again, he’s ever had to tell anybody else that they were dying before.

\---

“I’d want to see the Golden Gate bridge,” she says, voice light and trembling ever so slightly, “I know, it’s a silly thing, but when I moved here it was one of those things I put on my bucket list. I honestly never expected my bucket list to be this literal.”

There talking about their goals and aspirations this week.

Fitz had none too gently suggested that perhaps Grant’s goal could be to actually sit inside one of the meetings for once, and so he had, purely to go against the expectations of the familiar receptionist.

He wishes he could leave, but walking out of here now would cause a scene.

One more than his sudden appearance two minutes into the session had caused.

Except even though he’s uncomfortable and leaving seems a bit like a pleasant dream he can’t, because he’s transfixed by the figure of the young woman standing before the group.

Jemma’s looking thinner than the last time he saw her, the strap of her summer dress slipping off her shoulder, though she makes no move to adjust it, instead she continues speaking.

He thinks for a second that there’s a smile on her lips, as she looks about the room and her eyes settle on him.

“I know what you’re all thinking,” she continues, “ _Jemma just take a plane_ you say, because it ought to be as simple as that, but with my lungs in their current state, that’s near impossible.”

She’s still looking at him as she speaks, and it almost feels as though they’re having a private conversation, even though they’re in a room full of other people and he is not saying a single word.

“It’s a long drive from DC to San Francisco, forty-two hours actually, assuming we were going nonstop,” she smiles then, “I calculated it, mapped everything out, but it’s too far to go on my own.”

He knows they’re not supposed to interrupt each other, there were some rules that were outlined in a packet he only pretended to read through, but he can’t help responding to her, “don’t you have any friends to go with you?”

And she laughs at that, a sweet sorrow filled laugh, “not many people want a friend with an expiration date.”

\---

“You just got out of a war, Grant, you’re not about to drive some sick girl that you barely know across the country-“

“Why not,” he cuts her off, “because you’d rather I stayed here and,” he can’t finish that sentence, he doesn’t think that he’ll ever be able to, at least not until he’s already at death’s door, so instead he says, “help Christian’s campaign.”

“I’m your mother,” she says, as if he could have missed that fact.

But no, he remembers all too clearly the women in fine pressed pants suits who had no time for her trophy children, who frowned at them during the best of time. The woman who began a political career in the wake of her husband’s death, who pushed her children too hard – forcing one into her footsteps, another overseas, and the third towards an unforgiving bottle of pills.

“I’m thirty-one, that doesn’t hold much sway anymore,” he point out briskly, “and I wasn’t asking permission. I was letting you know before the press got ahold of it.”

She makes a pinched face at that, but finally says, “some days I wish that war would have killed you. It would have been less of an inconvenience.”

“You and I both.” 

\---

He gets the address from the receptionist, an address that he probably shouldn’t even have been given, there must have been some legal issues involving all of that.

But as he stands in front of the door of her apartment, he can’t find it in him to care.

She looks just as surprised to see him when he finally brings himself to knocking.

“You’re the man from Doctor Sitwell’s support group.”

“Yes,” he answers, “do you still want to go to San Francisco?”

“When did I imply I ever stopped wanting to?”

\---

He hasn’t been this reckless in years.

Not since he was eighteen and mere weeks from shipping to basic.

He had stolen one of his mother’s cars back then, the expensive sort of thing that politicians drove right before they lied about caring about the environment.

Thomas had been around then, demanding that they do one last thing before Grant left, so he’d taken the keys from her purse, and stolen his little brother away in the dead of the night.

They drove from the cramped city, to their old country farm house in Massachusetts.

To a place where their responsibilities where less and the air was lighter.

Years later he would look back on that night and wonder how he missed the signs, why he wasn’t slightly alarmed when his fifteen year old brother had pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, and asked Grant for a lighter.

Maybe that’s why he doesn’t know entirely how to answer when Jemma asks, “have you done this before,” in that light tone of hers.

\---

The sun rises while they’re still driving, their mostly one sided small talk dying down as light begins to flood their car, and when Jemma all but demands that he pulls off at the next rest stop he cannot deny her.

She climbs onto the roof of his truck with a lack of grace that he shouldn’t find charming, her breath catching in her throat, when he follows up after her far easier.

“Do you ever wonder if this sunrise will be your last,” she asks, casual, conversational.

How many times has she had this conversation before?

And how many of those people had already stopped watching the sunrise?

“I used to all the time,” he admits, more honest than he’s been in years, “back when I was overseas.”

Grant hasn’t talked about his past with her yet, and neither of them have the mind to talk about their future, but she nods as though she knows all of his secrets, before turning back to the rising sun.

There’s a song on her lips, soft and slow, that he’s unfamiliar with.

It’s soothing in its own way.

\---

  “How long do you intend to keep driving,” she asks when they’ve stopped for lunch, “I mean, we can’t just go forty-two hours in one sitting.”

“Why not?”

She makes this little laugh, that’s hardly charming, before saying, “I’m a doctor, or I was, and you can try to tell me that I’m not _that_ kind of doctor, but even I know that driving that long nonstop is a bad idea.”

“We’re stopped right now,” he points out, obtusely gesturing towards the little diner that they’ve stopped in.

“That’s not what I meant,” Jemma says, “I could drive, if you’d like, I have a license and-“

“Not a chance.”

“Why not?”

“I’m not letting the girl with _lung cancer_ drive my truck, for all I know your lungs could give out and then suddenly we’re driving off the road to an early death,” he says, before correcting, “an earlier death.”

She makes a disgruntled face, “I don’t have lung cancer, it’s-“

“Consumption?”

“What is this, the Victorian Ages?”

He shrugs his shoulders, and gets a little laugh out of her, and a brief moment of silence.

But apparently her moments of silence aren’t that long lived.

“I mean, are you even supposed to be driving in your condition,” she says, and her words are a bit too close for comfort.

He doesn’t answer her, but when he goes to take the next bite of his lunch, the fork hits his plate with far more forcefulness than necessary.

“I thought not,” she replies with a little huff, “if you don’t mind me asking, what exactly is it-“

“I mind,” he cuts her off.

“Oh, oh okay,” Jemma nods a bit then, seeming to curl in upon herself, her own eyes falling down her to her plate with newfound interest in her meal.

And for a while their silence is only broken up by coughs from her lips and the sound of cutlery on cheap plastic plates.

Then he has to ask, being the one to break it this time, “does it make you want to turn back? Knowing that I shouldn’t be doing this and not knowing the other thing.”

“I’m perfectly content to keep going, if you are?”

“Not even slightly worried that I’m kidnapping your or some crazy ax murder?”

She rolls her eyes at that, and adopts a teasing tone as she says “kidnapping the girl on death’s door, very smooth Mr. Ax Murderer.”

“Jemma-“

“I trust you,” she says.

“We barely know each other.”

“Doesn’t matter. I’ve already decided to trust you, there’s no take backs now,” she looks up at him then, meeting his eyes with her own eager doe-like ones, “now eat your lunch and let’s get back on the road.”

\---

They stop of the night at some hotel in the middle of nowhere, where he has to tell the tired teenager working the receptionist desk three times that they want a room with two beds.

Jemma pokes him in the side once they’ve gotten their room keys and tells him to be polite in that high and lofty tone of hers that’s starting to grow on him.

He falls asleep to the sound of her struggling to breathe in her sleep and his own head pounding as loud as a freight train.

\---

“I still don’t understand it.”

“Don’t understand what?”

“Why you’d want to drive someone you hardly know across the country?”

Wasn’t that the very same question he had spent far too long asking himself.

“Maybe I have my own reasons for wanting to go there.”

She makes a dismissive noise at that before asking, “and what might those be?”

He hadn’t thought of this before, not really, but admitting that to her was a though that left him more than slightly uneasy so he did what those long years as the son of a politician had taught him, he lied, “I want to see what the ocean looks like one the other side of the world, ride a rail car, buy a loaf of bread shaped like a turtle-“

“A what?”

“I saw it on Food Network,” he explains tersely.

“I never expected you to be the sort of person that watched the Food Network,” she replies, and he can feel her eyes on him now though he doesn’t turn away from the road to look at her. After a moment she speaks up again, “why do you really want to go there?”

 “I want to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge.”

That shuts her up.

\---

“I need you to pull over,” she announces, hands coming up to silence his radio.

For a second he does a quick check of all the time making sure that it’s not some sort of meal that he’s missed or nearing the sunset (since she seems to have a weird fixation with watching each sunrise and sunset), but neither of those seem to be right.

Which is why he asks, “are you alright,” in a voice that is just hinting at concerned.

“I’m fine,” Jemma replies quickly, “well not _fine_ , but no worse than the usual, I just need you to pull over.”

“If this is that extra-large soda you bought at the 7/11 talking.”

“Grant Douglas Ward, shut up and pull the truck over.”

He should probably be more bothered by the fact that she knows his full name, since he hadn’t told her more than his first, but there’s something stern in her tone that has him pulling off to the side of the freeway as quickly as he can.

It’s once they’ve come to a dead stop that he ends up asking, “are you going to explain or-“

“No,” she replies, a second later, before getting up and out of the vehicle, pacing off into the nearby wilderness without looking back at him.

He doesn’t say anything, and he doesn’t follower her, and after a few minutes she opens the door again, settling down into her seat and looking a bit more peaceful than she had been before.

“You can start driving again,” she says, buckling her seatbelt forcefully.

He pretends not to notice when she brings a hand up to wipe at her mouth with a grimace and the back of her hard comes away cover in the slightest hint of red.

It’s easier to not ask and just assume its lip gloss, even if he knows better.

\---

It’s late into the night when she brings it up again, after the lights are off and they’re both supposed to be sleeping.

Her voice carries across the small space of their hotel room, “you don’t really intend to do it, do you?”

He doesn’t have to ask what she’s talking about.

Neither does he have an easy answer for her.

So he doesn’t say anything, let’s her assume he’s fallen, because it’s easier than explaining that he doesn’t know what he’d do.

\---

“No offense meant, but the constantly coughing thing is a bit taxing to listen to.”

“Yes, because the four different bottles of migraine pills you keep rattling about in your glove box aren’t distracting at all.”

\---

Her hands are up playing with the dials of the radio, never settling on anything for very long, it’s annoying the way they keep flickering between songs, the lyrics never sticking around long enough for him to focus on them.

When he tells her to, “stop it,” the words come out harsher than he had intended for them to, and Jemma must notice that for she pulls her hands back from the radio instead of objecting like she normally might have.

They both sit in silence for a moment, the station she had stopped on at his words, filled the car with broken Spanish intermixed with the harsh buzzing of static.

Before that silence is broken and Jemma says, “you can’t honestly prefer this?”

“I do,” he insists, though it’s a lie.

“Grant-“

“Driver picks the music,” he says quickly and final in tone.

“I’m dying,” she points out, “dying person picks the music.”

A very small bitter part of him wants to point out that that still leaves them at this impasse, but he can’t get those words out, because that means admitting why they’re really doing this.

So instead he settles for, “don’t be dramatic.”

“Which one of us is the doctor around here?”

They’re still not talking about it, not properly, at this point he honestly doubt that they ever will.

He doesn’t answer her question, not now, not ever, but his fingers tighten on the steering wheel just a bit harder than before, and says, “just pick a station and stick with it.”

\---

“What do you mean you don’t have a room with double beds,” he says, giving the woman behind the desk a near fright with how stern his tone is.

“We’re all sold out and-“

“And it’s fine,” Jemma finishes for the woman, putting her hand down upon the counter with a slap, “we’ll take the single.”

He wants to object, insist that they can keep driving, but they’ve stopped for the night because his headaches had been getting worse and there was no way he was letting Jemma drive so they were pretty much stuck at this point.

Of course, knowing that they didn’t really have any other choice didn’t make it any easier.

Not when Jemma was smiling like a ray of sunlight, and he’d been doing his best to stem off the feelings that had slowly been building inside of him since the day at the clinic.

By time they’ve reached the room he’d already come to a decision, one that he put into action the second Jemma laid down onto the bed of their room with a tired sigh of relief.

“I’ll take the floor,” he says, moving to grab one of the pillows off the bed.

“We can share,” she replies, her fingers curling around the edge of his jacket, holding him in place.

“It’s not decent, and I wouldn’t want you to assume that-”

“Oh please, as though you’re such an appealing man, that I couldn’t restrain myself from jumping you, were we in the same bed.”

“That’s not how I was going to finish that,” he insists, though now his mind is stuck on that thought and his eyes are drawn to her lips.

“Oh, I see.”

“Not that I would mind.”

“Pardon?”

“Jumping me,” he clarifies, “I wouldn’t mind if you were to.”

“Oh wonderful, in that case,” she pushes herself up off the bed then, her grip on his jacket tightening, while her lips move towards hers, kissing him with a sense of urgency that comes all at once.

Kissing her back feels like the most natural thing in the world.

Her lips taste of iron when he kisses her, harsh and unforgiving, like death.

He knows that that means they should stop this, but she presses up closer against him, fingers curling in his faded old sweatshirt like she can’t get enough.

“We should take things slow,” he insists, because there’s a part of him that feels like he’s taking advantage of her even now, even when she’s been the one to initiate things.

“Do we really have time to take things slow?”

They don’t, and he can’t deny her that.

Not when life is already denying them so much.

\---

They watch the sunset from the bed of a hotel room, the light coming in through the blinds casting a glow on her pale skin, soft red and gold hues masking her form, as she leans down and kisses him again.

He closes his eyes and misses the rest of the sunrise, but he does not miss the way she stutters a breath against his lips or the mirror motions of their body.

Each desperately reaching towards the other.

As if every moment was their last.

As if a sunrise such as this one might never come again.

In truth, he couldn’t imagine another sunrise as beautiful as this one.

\---

They reach California by mid-day and she demands they stop once again, posing to take the standard tourist picture in front of the welcome sign.

Her fingers curl against his wrist, in a too weak grasp, as she asks some couple that’s stopped to take their photograph. She laughs with them like this is a normal occurrence, plasters a smile on her face that doesn’t look faked, and stares off towards their desperation with these wide hopeful eyes.

The smile on his face feels far too fake, but his hand slides down around her waist to pull her close as though he’s afraid of losing her.

“Well, we’re almost done,” he replies, when she’s gotten her cell phone back, cutting off some comment about having to stop somewhere to print the photographs off.

 And Jemma pauses then, looking up at him with the most innocently perplexed expression that he has ever seen, “nonsense, we’ve got our destination to enjoy, and then another forty-two hours in the other direction.”

“You mean I’m not allowed to leave you in San Francisco to fend for yourself?”

“Not a chance, you’re stuck with me for a little longer than that.”

\---

They do the standard tourist things.

Ate crab from a street stand, feed the sea lions from Pier 39, rode a rail way car, but the most important moment of it all – the real reason they were there, was the bridge.

“I don’t know why but I expected it to be yellow,” he says, hands stuck in his pockets as they walk along the path.

Jemma laughs at him for a second, her face scrunching up before she moves away from the other people on the walk way and steeping off to the side.

He joins her a second later, to look down on the water below.

The boats pass beneath them, just as the people pass around them.

On their own paths without any concern for the two of them and their own thoughts.

“Do you still think about jumping off?”

“No,” he says, unsure if it’s the truth or a lie, but knowing it’s the answer Jemma wants to hear.

Her nod is definite and sure, proving he’s picked the right choice.

“I imagine it would look different from that angle, the second before you hit the water,” she continues speaking, “seeing everything in perspective one last time. If you stood on the edge you could almost imagine it.”

“Would you like to?”

“Jump?”

“No, look at things from the edge?”

“I’d be worried about falling,” she says.

As though tomorrow is a definite thing, as though their days are not numbered, their sunrises are guaranteed, and their breaths not something trapped again their lungs.

And he plays along, a cruel trick though it is, “I’d catch you.”

 


End file.
